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Saturday August 25, 2012 8:07 AM

I didn’t know Katherine E. Mooney Moats, but, thanks to letters from my Uncle Ed, I can imagine
a bit of her life with Grandpa and their three sons in tiny Harrisburg, Ohio.When my mother died in
1991, she left me a sepia postcard from about 1910: Kate holds her pet bird, Jimmie, in front of
one of her paintings.

The single souvenir is what piqued my interest in Kate.

My grandmother, I learned, took art lessons at a studio in London, Ohio — reached by buggy or on
horseback.

She painted a Christ portrait that hung in the Ohio Methodist Church in Harrisburg, and her
painting of an outdoorsman porting his canoe was good enough to be stolen.

Other paintings of hers apparently exist elsewhere, if only I knew where.

I do have three of my grandma’s paintings through inheritance:

• A bridge over a thoroughfare (a creek or river).

• A girl lying across the paws of a St. Bernard.

• The three sons. (My father, DeWitt, was the youngest — not yet in his teens as painted.)

Several years ago, I acquired a fourth from an aunt: a rare landscape made of hair clippings
from her three boys. (I could easily identify my father’s hair, for I have one of his auburn curls
tied with a blue ribbon.)

I know, too, that Kate taught painting.One of her students was Laurabelle Mooney, a niece to
former Ohio Gov. John Bricker. Laurabelle, who taught art at Bowling Green State University until
her retirement, kept in touch with me until her death, also in 1991.

I had a notion — a difficult project — to paint Grandma from the sepia postcard. To do so, I
needed to identify Jimmie’s color.

I consulted Ruth May, a birder friend at Thurber Tower — where my husband, Lowell, and I live.
Ruth surmised that Jimmie was probably a common brown cowbird, as his shape, size and two-tone
color seem to fit.

Brown cowbirds are lazy, leaving their eggs in the nests of other birds for hatching. And they
are ground foragers — a fact that probably led to Jimmie’s “adoption” and his eventual demise.
(Kate stepped on him, my mother said.)

My postcard shows Kate, with a lace-trimmed cap covering her hair, smiling softly at Jimmie. The
painting on her easel depicts a landscape of a bridge and stream (a thoroughfare), mountains and a
house. I assume that the bridge and stream are the same as those in my inherited painting — the
place where the family fished and swam in summer, and ice-skated in winter.

During annual visits by Uncle Ed (the middle son) from Philadelphia, before and after my father’s
early death, we visited the Mooney family in Mount Sterling. Through the years, we visited the
homeplace in Harrisburg, the places in Kate’s painting and her Larkin store. (I have a small photo
of my father working in the store as a child.)

As I struggled with several attempts at creating a portrait from the postcard, I wished that
Grandma were here.I would like to have her visit our small art studio and meet our amazing
teachers. I would like to have her help me paint her.

Most of all, though, I would like to have her tell me more about her paintings — and where they
might be found.

Yet I can only whisper to Katherine E. Mooney Moats: “Rest in peace, Grandma Kate.”

The attempts by Ruth E. Mast, 83, of Columbus to capture Grandma Kate in pastels, watercolors
and pencil rest in a drawer designated for her “unfinished masterpieces.”